Five Questions Before Mapping Work Process

If you are the one who is in charge of mapping work process, it's better for you to glance over the five questions below, which might help you with an adequate preparation.

Question 1: Who should be on team and how large should the team be?
Generally groups of five to eight persons are ideal, fewer than five limits the range of ideas, while more than eight leaves some people standing around, not fully participate.Question 2: How should they participate in the activity?
Before you start, to have a meeting with all members together is necessary. It's a good opportunity to have everyone sit down together and discuss about the drawing. Or it can be done with group sessions, each group construct the map from scratch. Sometimes drawing the map individually and expose it to peer review is also fine. The leader can also go to each member personally to check how each part is going.Question 3: How long time will it take to finish the task?When estimate the time duration, please refer to the following factors that might affect the speed:
1. The complexity of your process.
2. The requisite knowledge and resource you have.
3. When you need to finish the map.Question 4: How to find the relative sources of information?There are many resources you can refer to, including documents, people, and observations. Many existing documents could be taken as references. Such as quality assurance manual, work description, procedures, workbook, production data and so on. These information may not fully related to each other, but they describe how the process should be conducted. What's more, observing and interviewing people may bring you the information more than you expected.Question 5: How detailed should your work process map be?It totally depends on your needs. But normally we don't make it too detailed, so as not to ignore the essential parts.

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